Native Markdown

MediaWiki extension that makes Markdown a native content model: whole pages are stored and edited as Markdown and rendered with real wiki integration (internal links, categories, search, templates, and more), coexisting with wikitext pages on the same wiki.

Because pages are stored as plain Markdown, they are directly consumable and writable by LLMs and agents: action=raw returns clean Markdown; no wikitext conversion needed. See For AI agents and LLMs.

• Introduction to the extension
• Usage documentation
• Installation
• Configuration
• Templates and parser functions
• For AI agents and LLMs
• Comparison with other Markdown extensions
• Development
• Release notes

Get professional support for this extension via Professional Wiki, its creators and maintainers. We provide MediaWiki Development, MediaWiki Hosting, and MediaWiki Consulting services.

Installation

Platform requirements:

• PHP 8.1 or later
• MediaWiki 1.43 or later

Installation uses Composer with MediaWiki's built-in support for Composer.

On the command line, go to your wiki's root directory. Then run these two commands:

COMPOSER=composer.local.json composer require --no-update professional-wiki/native-markdown:~1.0

composer update professional-wiki/native-markdown --no-dev -o

Then enable the extension by adding the following to the bottom of your wiki's LocalSettings.php file:

wfLoadExtension( 'NativeMarkdown' );

For Markdown syntax highlighting in the editor, also install the CodeEditor extension:

For syntax highlighting of fenced code blocks in the rendered page, install the SyntaxHighlight extension (bundled with MediaWiki). When it is installed, a fenced block whose info string names a language is highlighted server-side with Pygments, exactly like a wikitext <syntaxhighlight> block; without it, code blocks render as plain preformatted text.

```python
def greet(name):
    print(f"Hello {name}")
```

Configuration

New pages use the Markdown content model where the wiki's configuration says so. Defaults apply to page creation only; existing pages never change model implicitly. Individual pages can be switched between wikitext and Markdown (in both directions) via Special:ChangeContentModel.

Setting	Default	Effect
$wgNativeMarkdownNamespaces	[]	Namespace IDs in which new pages default to Markdown, e.g. [ NS_HELP ]
$wgNativeMarkdownEverywhere	true	New pages everywhere default to Markdown, the "Markdown wiki" mode (see exclusions below); set to false to keep wikitext as the default
$wgNativeMarkdownSuffixDetection	false	New pages whose title ends in .md default to Markdown, except in the Template and MediaWiki namespaces
$wgNativeMarkdownAllowExternalImages	false	Embed external  images; when off they render as plain links
$wgNativeMarkdownWikitextExpansion	true	Run {{...}} on Markdown pages through the MediaWiki parser: templates, parser functions, magic words, and Lua modules. Set to false to leave {{...}} as literal text (see Templates and parser functions)

$wgNativeMarkdownEverywhere covers the whole prose wiki but deliberately leaves some pages as wikitext: the discussion (Talk), Template, and MediaWiki namespaces, namespaces whose content model is explicitly configured elsewhere, and titles ending in .css, .js or .json. $wgNativeMarkdownSuffixDetection reads the .md suffix as a deliberate per-page choice, so it also applies inside Talk namespaces. The configuration documentation covers the exact semantics of both.

Converting existing pages

Those defaults apply at page creation only, so enabling suffix detection or adding a namespace never touches pages that already exist. The NativeMarkdown:ConvertToMarkdownModel maintenance script is the retroactive counterpart: it switches existing wikitext pages to the Markdown model using the very same rules, selecting pages via --md-suffix and/or --namespace <id> (combinable, at least one being required). It changes the content model, not the page text — the stored wikitext is then reinterpreted as Markdown and may render differently — so always start with --dry-run. Redirects are skipped, --batch-size controls how many pages each batch processes, and each conversion is an ordinary revision, reversible per page with Special:ChangeContentModel. The configuration documentation covers the exact selector semantics.

php maintenance/run.php NativeMarkdown:ConvertToMarkdownModel --md-suffix --dry-run
php maintenance/run.php NativeMarkdown:ConvertToMarkdownModel --namespace 3000
php maintenance/run.php NativeMarkdown:ConvertToMarkdownModel --md-suffix --namespace 10

Templates and parser functions

Markdown pages can use MediaWiki's {{...}} syntax. Because expansion delegates to the wikitext parser, this covers the whole double-brace surface: templates (a wiki's shared infoboxes, citations and navboxes), parser functions ({{#if:}}, {{#switch:}}, and so on), magic words and variables ({{PAGENAME}}, {{CURRENTYEAR}}), and, where Scribunto is installed, Lua modules via {{#invoke:}}. Set $wgNativeMarkdownWikitextExpansion = false to turn this off and leave {{...}} as literal text.

{{Infobox person
| name = Ada Lovelace
| born = 1815
}}

Ada Lovelace was an English **mathematician**, regarded as the first computer programmer.

Because it is the real parser, the same trust and resource model as wikitext applies: template dependencies are tracked, recursion and size limits apply, output is sanitized exactly as wikitext is, and enabling {{...}} grants a Markdown page the same capabilities a wikitext page has. Notably out of scope in this version: <ref> tags and transcluding Markdown pages with {{:Page}}. The template documentation covers the placement rules (block versus inline calls, escaping) and the full scope notes.

For AI agents and LLMs

Markdown is the native read/write format of today's language models, and Native Markdown stores pages as exactly that: plain Markdown, no wikitext wrapper. That makes a Markdown page directly consumable and directly writable by an agent, with no lossy conversion step in either direction:

• Read the source with action=raw:

  GET /index.php?title=Release_Notes.md&action=raw
  

  returns the raw Markdown, front matter and all, exactly the bytes an author typed.

• Read via the REST API, which also reports the model:

  GET /rest.php/v1/page/Release_Notes.md
  → { "content_model": "markdown", "source": "# Release Notes\n...", ... }
  

• Read the rendered HTML with action=parse (?action=parse&page=Release_Notes.md&prop=text), for when an agent wants the resolved links and table of contents rather than the source.

• Write through the ordinary editing APIs (action=edit, the REST update endpoint) or, more conveniently, through the MediaWiki MCP Server: an agent hands over Markdown and it is stored verbatim, rendered with full wiki integration on read.

Because the round trip is lossless, an agent can fetch a page as Markdown, edit it, and write it back without the content drifting through a wikitext translation. Links work the way a model already writes them: a plain [label](Page Name) link whose target names a page resolves to an internal wiki link, spaces and all. The usage documentation covers link resolution and search indexing in detail.

Comparison with other Markdown extensions

Native Markdown exists because no maintained extension makes Markdown a native content model:

• Extension:WikiMarkdown embeds Markdown blocks inside wikitext pages via a tag, plus a shallow .md content handler with no working [[wiki links]], categories, or table of contents inside the Markdown.
• Extension:Markdown is archived, and MarkdownExtraParser has been unmaintained for over a decade.

See the full comparison on our website for more detail. Related but different: our ExternalContent extension embeds Markdown files from external sources (like GitHub) into wikitext pages, while Native Markdown is for the wiki's own pages being Markdown. They compose nicely.

Development

The Application layer (the whole Markdown pipeline) has no MediaWiki dependencies, so the unit suite runs standalone in the extension directory with no MediaWiki install:

composer install
composer test

Style checks and static analysis, also standalone: composer cs, composer phpstan, composer psalm.

The full suite including integration tests runs inside a MediaWiki install, from the MediaWiki root:

php tests/phpunit/phpunit.php extensions/NativeMarkdown/tests/phpunit/

Release notes

Version 1.2.0 - 2026-07-17

• A ConvertToMarkdownModel maintenance script converts existing wikitext pages to the Markdown content model, selecting them by .md suffix and/or namespace, the same way the activation settings select new pages. It changes the content model rather than the page text, skips redirects, and supports --dry-run
• Fenced code blocks whose info string names a language are now syntax highlighted, the same way a wikitext <syntaxhighlight> block is. This needs the SyntaxHighlight extension (bundled with MediaWiki) to be installed; without it, code blocks keep rendering as plain preformatted text
• Code blocks no longer get a background pill behind each of their lines, which happened because skins style the code element for inline use and CommonMark nests it inside pre
• A thumb file embed alone on its line now renders as a standalone framed thumbnail rather than being wrapped in a paragraph, which produced invalid HTML5 and a stray empty paragraph
• A thumb embed of a missing file now renders the framed box with its caption and an upload link, the way wikitext does, instead of a bare upload link that silently dropped the caption
• Thumbnail embeds now load the same media module MediaWiki loads for wikitext thumbnails, so their magnify affordance works

Version 1.1.0 - 2026-07-09

• Standard Markdown [label](target) links now resolve to wiki pages, the same as [[target]]: a target that names a page (rather than a URL) becomes an internal link, with red/blue styling and link-table registration. Multi-word targets work directly, e.g. [the guide](Help:Getting Started). Real URLs stay external links.

Version 1.0.1 - 2026-07-07

• Redirect pages now render and register the content after the #REDIRECT [[Target]] line, so redirect categories (and any other trailing links or prose) work the same as on wikitext redirects

Version 1.0.0 - 2026-07-07

Initial release for MediaWiki 1.43+ with these features:

• Markdown content model (markdown) rendering CommonMark + GitHub Flavored Markdown with footnotes
• Wikitext link syntax inside Markdown: internal links, section links, categories, file embeds, interwiki
• MediaWiki integration: table of contents, red/blue links, link tables, WhatLinksHere, WantedPages/Files
• Clean full-text search: rendered prose is indexed, not raw markup; front matter excluded
• YAML front matter parsed, hidden from output and stored as page metadata
• Per-page model switching via Special:ChangeContentModel, namespace/suffix/wiki-wide activation modes
• MediaWiki {{...}} expansion (on by default): templates, parser functions, magic words and Lua run through the real parser with dependency tracking; opt out with $wgNativeMarkdownWikitextExpansion = false
• XSS-safe by construction: raw HTML escaped, unsafe links blocked, external images off by default
• action=raw / REST return the stored Markdown byte for byte, built for AI agents and git round-trips
• CodeEditor syntax highlighting on Markdown pages

Initial release announcement: https://professional.wiki/en/news/native-markdown-released